The Buffalo Bills rocked the NFL landscape by trading wide receiver Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans on Wednesday, ending Diggs’ four-year run with the club.
It also essentially ends the Bills’ window of Super Bowl contention. At least for now, considering that it’s hard to imagine a team employing Khalil Shakir and Curtis Samuel as its top two receivers legitimately pushing for a championship. Well, maybe if Patrick Mahomes were the quarterback. Otherwise, no.
Perhaps general manager Brandon Beane has another trick up his sleeve heading into 2024, but that seems doubtful given Buffalo’s salary cap situation.
And that’s just the thing: the Bills made their cap status worse by trading Diggs.
Had Buffalo held on to Diggs through next season, his cap hit would have been $28 million. But now that the team traded him away, that cap hit stretches to over $31 million.
How bad was the situation for Diggs in Buffalo that the Bills were actually content with worsening their salary cap woes just to move on from him?
Not only that, but the compensation for Diggs wasn’t exactly stellar.
Buffalo received a 2025 second-round draft pick from the Texans in return for the 30-year-old, and on top of that, the Bills actually sent Houston a couple of late-round picks in the deal, as well.
Clearly, something was not right with Diggs in Buffalo, and that was made pretty evident this past season after he logged five 100-yard performances over his first six games and then did not register a single 100-yard outing the rest of the way.
Diggs wasn’t injured. The Bills weren’t conserving him. They were fighting for their playoff lives. You would think they would have wanted to involve Diggs as much as possible.
It lends credence to the notion that the relationship between Diggs and quarterback Josh Allen was never really simpatico.
Diggs has expressed public displays of displeasure in Buffalo the last couple of years. Many just attributed it to Stefon being Stefon, and in a way, that’s probably true. But it’s also indicative that something was off between Allen and Diggs, regardless of how many times Allen brushed it off.
Either the Bills were so fed up with Diggs that they wanted him gone at the expense of their salary cap, or Diggs demanded a trade. If it were the latter, Buffalo was not under any obligation to move Diggs, given that he was under contract with the squad through 2027. But perhaps the Bills simply did not want to deal with a disgruntled Diggs potentially sabotaging the locker room in 2024.
Diggs made the Pro Bowl in each of his four seasons in Buffalo, so it’s not like he wasn’t productive. Heck, in his debut campaign with the Bills, he led the NFL in receptions and receiving yards. Even this past season in what many would consider a down year, he caught 107 passes for 1,183 yards and eight touchdowns.
For the Bills to be that untroubled (or so it seems) moving on from such a dynamic threat tells you something about what may have been going on behind closed doors.
Of course, it’s also entirely possible that Buffalo felt Diggs’ second-half slide in 2023 was a result of a physical decline rather than anything else. He is on the wrong side of 30 now, after all. But would the Bills sacrifice financial resources just to trade him at this juncture? Strange.
Unless Diggs himself talks, we may never know what happened in Buffalo. Allen almost certainly isn’t going to say anything. Beane is being very diplomatic, as expected. You probably won’t get anything out of head coach Sean McDermott, either.
All we know is that Stefon Diggs is no longer a member of the Bills, and Buffalo’s window has almost certainly slammed shut because of it.
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